


front of my skull

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Art, Collaboration, Major Illness, Mention of Symptoms of Cancer, Other, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25075375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: The thing inside the door didn’t ever really saywhyit was there, peeking its head out at him. Eventually creeping out, around the doorjamb, introducing itself. Asking about him. Working itself—very seamlessly, if he thinks about it—into the fabric of his life.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 13
Kudos: 142





	front of my skull

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klaxic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klaxic/gifts).



> art/fic collaboration with [klaxic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klaxic)!

Michael announces himself as a headache. Not unlike Gerry’s usual headaches on the face of them, but he’s learned to tell the difference. Michael’s headaches tend to put a taste of candy floss in his mouth.

He’s sitting on the floor of a hotel room in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with a crumpled McDonald’s bag and a half-empty milkshake next to him, having his fifth smoke of the evening in full view of the _No Smoking_ plaque beside the door. The television on, but muted. No matter how low he turns the volume it still hurts his ears. He had to flip through a dozen channels before he found one showing something black and white, easier to look at.

He’s been worse than ever since they arrived in the States. He’s been keeping quiet about it, mostly. If he brings up his headaches Gertrude will shake her bag at him until he digs some aspirin out of it and that’s the most they discuss it. He keeps missing her wake-up calls in the morning. Smoking helps, a little. He just has to be careful not to stand up too fast, that’s all. It makes him dizzy. He’s probably anemic. That’s his running theory.

Smoking helps. It helps that Michael has been visiting more often, too.

His saliva tastes suddenly very sweet and the backs of his eyes begin to throb. He looks up at the door that has appeared in the dingy popcorn ceiling over his head.

He takes his cigarette between his teeth and gets up, carefully, levering his weight against the edge of the bed. “Just a minute,” he says. As if in answer the throb behind his eyes lessens a little. He gets up on the bed, stands, wobbling a little, reaches up to wrap his hand around the knob of the door in the ceiling.

It opens inward, weirdly. (Of course it does.) Behind it, he glimpses green wallpaper and carpet the color of acorn squash, and then a hand with very long, very sharp fingers curls around the doorjamb.

“Hello,” Gerry says, climbing cautiously down off the bed again.

He settles back on the floor while Michael folds himself out of the doorway, like a long-legged spider emerging from a crack in the wall. Apparently tonight Michael feels like hanging upside-down by his knees, because after a moment Gerry feels long blonde curls brushing against his forehead.

He scoots to the side, looks up, smiles. “Evening,” he says.

“Smoking is a disgusting habit, Gerard,” says Michael. He plucks the cigarette out of Gerry’s mouth with the tips of his very sharp fingers. For a moment, Gerry thinks he’s about to take a drag; instead he watches the cigarette disappear whole into Michael’s mouth. The thing doesn’t even pretend to chew.

“News to me,” says Gerry, mildly. He nudges his shoulders in under the edge of the mattress behind him, reaches into his back pocket for his packet of smokes and his lighter, fires up another one.

“I came to visit.” The sentence lingers, as if there is more to it, but if there is, Michael declines to finish it.

“I can see that.” Gerry scuffs the carpet beside him with the palm of his hand. “Come out of there and sit if you’re going to stay.”

Michael makes a noncommittal noise and does not move to come out. His head twists 180 degrees toward the television and his technicolor eyes narrow in confusion.

“It’s _A Streetcar Named Desire,_ ” Gerry says. “Did you ever see it?”

“No.”

“Suppose it’s not colorful enough for you.”

Michael makes that same noncommittal noise. They are quiet for a while, watching the flickering screen, the actors moving soundlessly through their silver world.

He isn’t sure if this routine is something he needs to tell Gertrude about. So far he has not thought so. It’s been nice to have someone else to talk to—even if he isn’t entirely sure Michael _is_ someone else. The probability that a thing like Michael exists, and likes to talk to him and eat his cigarettes, is just as likely as the probability that he is entirely in Gerry’s head—leftover Leitner magic. Lingering effects from a blow to the head he had in Paris last year. He’s dealt with much worse in his life. It doesn’t seem like something he needs to bother Gertrude with.

He’d met Michael around the time his headaches started. Not long after he started working with Gertrude. Here and there, never for very long. Very occasionally, a door would appear in the wall of his bedroom in Morden, or in an alleyway where he’d stopped for a smoke. Once, even in the elevator of a parking garage, where he’d been investigating a suspicious death by falling. The thing inside the door didn’t ever really say _why_ it was there, peeking its head out at him. Eventually creeping out, around the doorjamb, introducing itself. Asking about him. Working itself—very seamlessly, if he thinks about it—into the fabric of his life. Appearing at night when he couldn’t sleep or was feeling sick, as he feels more and more these days. Popping up as he was resting from this or that supernatural encounter, gathering his thoughts for his report to Gertrude, as if checking on him. Draping itself half-in, half-out of its door while Gerry ate supper or perused an old book, chattering away about things in riddles. He reminds Gerry of the unwanted child in the neighborhood—never quite anyone’s friend, never worth anyone’s time to bully, either. Too much, too loud, too colorful, too present.

But Gerry, by circumstance or by nature, is a solitary person. Company, sometimes, is nice, even if it isn’t invited, even if it makes his ears ring. He likes Michael. As long as Michael behaves, he can stay.

He asked it once what it wanted. It didn’t have an answer for him. In his experience, things that wanted to kill you made their intentions known upfront. So that had been good enough for him.

Now, watching Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando move silently across the screen, he feels Michael’s clammy hands coming to rest on either side of his head, their razor-blade fingertips poking his collarbone beneath his black shirt.

“You aren’t feeling yourself,” he coos. It’s hard to tell past the ever-present distortion in his voice, but Gerry thinks he detects concern.

He doesn’t move his head for fear of accidentally cutting himself on Michael’s fingers, but lifts his cigarette to his lips all the same. He breathes out a plume of blue smoke.

“Just the usual. Headaches and that.”

Michael hums thoughtfully. The sound transforms halfway through into the buzzing of bees. He inches a little further out of his door, still clinging to the jamb by his knees, enough to look Gerry in the face. Albeit upside down. Blocking his view of the television. His eyes hurt to look at, so Gerry focuses on his nose instead.

“ _She’s_ running you ragged, is she.”

He never calls Gertrude by her name.

“No more than usual.”

“How many times have I told you to leave her, Gerard?”

Gerry scoffs, but with good humor. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know her.”

Michael makes a noise not unlike a rattlesnake’s warning shake.

“Easy.” He reaches up and carefully peels away Michael’s hand from his face—with effort; his hands are always so much heavier, somehow, than he assumes. He gives it a little reassuring squeeze, which feels like squeezing a glove filled with chicken bones. “Thanks for your concern. We’re on an actual lead now. It’s all fine.”

“ _You’re_ not fine, Gerard. I _worry_ about you.”

He imagines, briefly and ridiculously, Michael curled up in the hallway behind his door, fretting his fingers through his curly hair. He smiles. “Well, that’s sweet of you.”

Michael scoffs. His head rotates again on his neck, and through some mind-aching contortion of his long, strange body, after a moment his chin is resting gently on Gerry’s shoulder, his hands very carefully combing Gerry’s dark hair back away from his face.

“I would be very distressed if anything happened to you,” he says, his voice like microphone feedback in Gerry’s ear. He tries not to flinch, out of respect. “I don’t have very many friends, Gerard.” Michael frowns; Gerry can see it in his wavering reflection in the television. “I fear something dreadful is going to happen to you.”

Gerry laughs, softly. “I never took you for a harbinger of bad omens. Maybe a harbinger of mad ones.”

“I contain multitudes,” says Michael, sighing against his neck.

He wouldn’t expect Michael’s hair to be so soft, given the unrelenting sharpness of the rest of him. But it is soft, moving sinuously against his face. He can’t remember the last time someone touched him gently, or laid their head on his shoulder.

On the screen, Stella is in labor. The image swims in front of his eyes, drifting in and out of focus. He can feel Michael watching him while he rubs at his eyelids, wincing at the pain lancing occasionally through his skull.

“I had a bit of an incident,” Gerry say slowly, deeply aware of Michael’s gaze, his pink and green and yellow eyes rolled sideways in their sockets to bore into his brain. He clears his throat, fixing on the television, furrowing his brows. “In the hallway in a hotel. In Auckland.” He clears his throat again, embarrassed. He isn’t used to talking about these things. “I think I collapsed. Fainted, maybe. I don’t know. I was tired.”

“Perhaps,” says Michael, carefully taking hold of Gerry’s chin in his fingers and squeezing, “you should see a _doctor_ , Gerard.”

Gerry laughs. “ _You’re_ suggesting I seek medical attention?” He turns his head a little, even though it hurts, to look into the crazy wheeling colors of Michael’s eyes, big, staring back at him. “I’m not even convinced you’re real. Rich, that, coming from you.”

“I think ‘selfish’ is the better word. Supposing, of course, that I have a self.”

“I’ll be fine. I _am_ fine. It’s nice of you to worry.” He smiles. He means it, too. “Can’t say a monster’s ever worried about me before.”

Michael sighs. He pats Gerry’s cheek, perhaps a bit too hard, but he won’t hold it against him. For a moment his sharp thumb rests under Gerry’s lip, just below his labret. He looks his face up and down, and Gerry lets him, unsure what he’s hoping to find. Every pass of his eyes feels like the ghost of a sunburn against his skin.

“I remember me in you, I think,” Michael says, when has finished looking, swinging back a little from his perch on the doorjamb. For once his voice is not so harsh on the ear. It’s softer, further away. Thoughtful. His eyes unfocus, inward. “Or I remember him, and you—separately and the same. I do not hurt the way you do, but I did.” He tangles his fingers in his long blonde hair, tugging a little, as if frustrated that he cannot remember something. He scowls. “He did. He does, you do. She’s going to hurt you, Gerard, if she hasn’t already, the way she hurt me, him. Now or after. I couldn’t say.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not.” Michael growls, low in his throat, but not at Gerry—he recognizes it as annoyance. Michael sighs again, the sound of television static unrolling in a long fluid arc.

“Look,” Gerry says, unfolding his legs, kneeling up to Michael’s eye level, even though it makes his head pitch sideways with sudden vertigo. He holds on to the edge of the bed for balance. “Here. I’ll get some sleep tonight and maybe see about a doctor in Pittsburgh. Happy?”

“Happy,” says Michael, but not in the affirmative—more as if he is tasting the word, imagining it. His scowl hasn’t left his face.

“If my headaches go away,” Gerry says, “you might go away, too. Thought of that?”

“I don’t go away, Gerard.” The smile on Michael’s face is hesitant, but he does see it, slowly appearing, curling up his lips almost shyly. “Nobody is rid of me that easily. _Particularly_ not my friends.”

“Right.” Gerry reaches down for the remote on the floor, clicks off the television with purpose. The screen sucks inward and disappears in a cathode blip. He smiles at Michael, amiably. “See? Movie’s off. I’m going to bed. Thank you. It was nice to see you. Really.”

Before he can get up, Michael’s hands come softly to his face again, and he pauses, careful of those fingers. Michael leans in, angled out from his door, and very gently kisses Gerry’s forehead, right at the spot from which his headaches always seem to radiate—up and behind his left eye, above his eyebrow piercings. The kiss is pins and needles. It makes his eyes water, want to roll backward into his head. He feels an ugly tugging on the inside of his skull, and then it is over. Michael leans back and observes him, as if satisfied.

His headache is gone. He blinks, rubs the numb spot where Michael’s lips had been.

“Did you just eat my headache?” he says.

“Goodnight,” says Michael, airily. He folds upward and slips back inside his door, and Gerry sees again that hideous carpet before the door closes and blinks out of existence, as if it had never been. Which, of course, it hadn’t.

He sits there for a while, finishing his cigarette, in the new quiet, listening to the tinnitus of Michael’s visit fading out of the air. In all honesty, he probably won’t see about a doctor in Pittsburgh. He probably won’t tell Gertrude about any of it. He’s certain it isn’t anything serious, no matter what his visitor says. And even if it is, he has time, he’s sure. There’s always time.

And anyway, the longer he puts it off, the longer Michael will stay. He likes Michael. It’d be a shame to get rid of him. He’d miss him, he knows.

He climbs into bed a little while later, grateful for an un-throbbing head. He stares at the spot on the ceiling where Michael’s door had been until he drops off, gently, to swirling and multicolored dreams.


End file.
